


sleepless

by bringingglory



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Angst?, Cats, Gen, Introspection, Loneliness, Night walks, Rain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:07:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28232160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bringingglory/pseuds/bringingglory
Summary: Al often thinks about the first night he realized he couldn’t sleep.---Alternatively: Al goes for a walk in the middle of the night and finds a cat.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 27





	sleepless

Al often thinks about the first night he realized he couldn’t sleep.

He thinks about everything leading up to it.

Like the blood staining the wood, the black corpse twitching on the ground, and the wet sound it made when it died.

Like watching his hand shatter like a dropped pot before other little black hands stole the rest of his body away.

Like waking up to see his brother laying on the ground with two less limbs than he had started with; Al himself in a much larger, clunkier body than he remembered, suddenly taller than anyone he knew, taller than a normal ten-year-old should have been, taller than any human should have been.

It was a lot to take in.

He remembers a storm brewing before they started the ritual. It had picked up while they were busy trading a body and two limbs for something that was supposed to be their mom but instead was a withered husk made of 35 liters of water, 25 kilograms of carbon, 4 liters of ammonia, 1.5 kilograms of lime, 800 grams of phosphorus— 

The rain was lashing at the windows by the time Al got outside, but he didn’t notice the feel of it running in rivulets down the grooves of his armor or how the usual chill of water didn’t soak into the bone. At first he thought it was shock, but he later realized it was the armor.

(Did he think about his bones at the time? Did he give a passing thought at the hollowness in his chest? Or had he been too focused on trying to stop his older brother from bleeding out onto the floor while the blood dripped through the holes in the chainmail of his hands?)

Al remembers the fatigue settling in, though, deceptively familiar like he still had a body that got tired. After getting Brother all bandaged up and wrapping the warmth of Winry and Granny’s house around himself like a blanket, he decided he had enough of the day. All he wanted was to close his eyes and blissfully block out everything for a few hours. So he retreated to one of the spare rooms and shut his eyes and waited for that familiar tide of unconsciousness to wash over him, waited for sleep to reach its dark fingers out to pull him under, waited to slip away from the world.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

He got up a few hours later only to find out there was still five hours to sunrise.

Al remembers looking over at Brother lying asleep on the bed a few feet away, lower body obscured by the blanket, but the sleeve of his right shoulder crumpled flat against his bed. Even the fabric pressed hollows where missing limbs used to be.

(If he takes off the armor, carves out that sheet of metal where the blood seal is, wiggles under a bed cover and lays there, will anyone notice all the missing limbs? The missing body? The missing boy?) 

He remembers walking out of the house and sitting in the damp field. He remembers running his hands through the tufts of grass, digging them into the soil, and the dirt crawling in through the holes of the chainmail and then wondering how he was going to clean that out. He remembers hours and hours of sitting in the grass wrapped in moonlight and waiting and waiting and waiting for the sun to rise.

If only he could tell himself then just how much waiting he would do.

There’s no field to sit in to wait for the sunrise now, though. Not in the cramped hotel room nestled in between two tall buildings, built on cobblestone roads running all the way to the horizon. All Al has is the window, the sliver of light from street lamps poking through the curtains, and the hum of rain drumming steadily against the window.

Al has spent countless nights like the first one. Waiting for the sun to rise, waiting for Brother to wake up, waiting for the rest of the world to wake up. He spends a lot of time by himself, considering how rarely other people see him apart from Brother. But sitting in the hotel room with darkness pressing against all corners and the rain drowning out the sound of his brother’s snores, it’s easy to pretend he’s all alone right now without even a sunrise to keep him company.

He decides to go for a walk outside.

The rain is coming down hard out here, harder than anticipated considering the low thrum of it against the roof. Maybe it’s because out here, he can feel every droplet pelt one by one against his metal skin.

Well, _feel_ isn’t exactly the right word. Not in the way that implies the sensation of wetness and the resulting chill it brings. He feels the rain run down the grooves of his armor in the way he’s vaguely aware of the rain running down the roof. He should feel cold—he remembers feeling cold, and yet he can’t describe the nothingness that brings, like a hollow cavity in his chest where his heart should be, like a phantom limb that’s actually a phantom body.

(Brother’s stumps ache when the weather changes—the effects of phantom limbs. Al thinks he feels that ache sometimes when the night settles in, when the moon peers out from the black sky, when the rest of the world shuts its eyes and the wind sings its lullabies to everyone except him. So the ache builds slow and spreads inside his hollow chest, going out and out because the world stretches cavernously wide when there are no voices or faces or people to fill it. That’s what phantom pain is, right? Aching for something no longer there. His soul aches. Aches for what? A clock that matches everyone else’s. Aches for what? Voices and light and rain on his skin and rain on his tongue. Aches for what? What does his soul ache for?)

Al ventures further down the road to where the streets narrow to account for less foot traffic. The wind roars around him, whistling through narrow alleyways and jostling flags and banners on their poles. _I should feel cold,_ he thinks. A wind this strong should be piercing. 

He accidentally steps in a puddle when he spots a cat shivering under the overhang of a store. A little calico with the white parts of its fur matted down with mud sits on the wet pavement. It sticks out a pink tongue, licks its paw, and hisses when a droplet of water slides down the roof and falls squarely between its eyes. 

The cat stretches and turns, revealing the lines of its rib cage poking out from its skin. It looks so skinny, and it must be freezing, what with the rain crashing mercilessly into the ground, drop after drop cascading down onto each other to explode into fine particles of mist that hang low and gray against the night. The calico would feel how piercing the wind is. Fur isn’t strong enough armor to block it out.

He takes a step forward and the metal of his armor clinks against each other grindingly loud. The cat startles and Al freezes. The last thing he wants to do is scare it away.

But he can imagine what the cat sees: a giant hulking figure in the dark outlined by the mist like some mysterious monster emerging from a horror novel. 

Al takes up so much space in this armor. His head bumps against doorways and hits the roof of cars and he has to turn sideways sometimes to walk into a building. If only the universe also accounted for how little space the inside of him took up. If he could compress the outer shell a little more, compress it into the shape of a normal boy, maybe he’d feel less hollow, maybe he’d fit into places better—maybe he could fit his head on a pillow and pretend he could sleep.

He crouches down.

“Don’t be afraid,” he tells the cat. His voice always rings inside his helmet.

Al offers out a chainmail hand for the calico to sniff. It does, and when it decides Al doesn’t smell dangerous (he can only smell like wet metal at this point, like maybe a wet car), the cat brushes its furry face against his hand and curls its tail around a finger. It occurs to him that he should get the cat out of the rain, so he lifts the cat and puts it inside himself.

The cat lets out one yelp of surprise. It shuffles around inside for a bit before accepting its fate and settles into the armor, going silent.

Strange how he can feel the cat moving around inside his armor. And stranger when it starts purring because the vibrations of it sends the tiniest tremors through his metal skeleton all the way to his fingertips, almost like his chainmail hands are tingling. It fills his hollow chest with something warm, like little sunbeams brushing the insides of his armor. Well, that’s not exactly accurate because he can’t feel warmth, but as it presses into his chest, he can almost pretend that the cat’s heartbeat is his.

Al walks down the dark streets as the light from the street lamps go hazy in the rain. The water pelts against him and he wonders if the cat hears it, wonders what the cat thinks of it. Does it feel safe in the armor? Does it feel like a shelter? If he weren’t moving, would the inside of the armor sound like the inside of a hotel room on a stormy night?

(He does a lot of wondering by himself. A thing he wonders now is: if he stood still in the rain long enough, would he rust? Like a bicycle left exposed to the elements? If he did rust, then he wouldn’t be able to move, and there would be nothing left to distinguish the boy from the suit of armor. And what then?)

He arrives at the hotel and sneaks in through the back door where the front desk is unlikely to catch him smuggling a cat inside. Al takes a seat at a table next to a window, then reaches down inside of himself and sets the cat on the floor.

It looks around curiously before jumping onto the table and laying down. He reaches out and begins stroking its fur.

Al likes collecting cats. It baffles Brother, but Al likes collecting them and giving them shelter in his armor. He likes petting them and running his chainmail hands through their fur, even if it reminds him of how much he misses feeling the warmth radiating from these living things and the soft fur under the skin of his fingertips. 

He wonders if the cat is hungry and then he thinks about the notebook full of foods he’d like to eat once he gets his body back. It’s stored inside the armor, his body, the enormous metal pocket that can hold everything from his notebook to a cat to his soul. He can fit so many things inside this armor: a journal, some animals, a normal sized person, maybe two small people, a person and an animal—he can fit so many things, none of which include his own body. It can’t hold his physical beating heart or his lungs, so he’s left with a hollow chest and chainmail hands and eyes that cry no tears without aid from the rain.

He realizes a moment later that the cat fell asleep. He doesn’t have to worry if it’s hungry or not now.

Al supposes he should head back to the hotel room at some point. The roar of the rain is slowing down, softening into a gentle murmur. Soon, the sun will poke its head out from behind the clouds, gently flood the world with light, and _finally_ shake everyone else awake. It will climb over the horizon and wash over the buildings of the city like it washed over the green field he sat in that first night.

(Al hasn’t missed a sunrise in four years. He doesn’t get to watch all of them, but he feels every single one coming. He’s awake for all of them, after all. Days like these where the Elric brothers have a peaceful night and Brother gets to sleep through all of it is when Al most earnestly wonders if anyone else is waiting for the sunrise with him. Is there someone else in the city with their eyes glued to the same sky? It’s like the notion of watching the same moon, but less romantic, more desperate. He’s kind of sick of the moon anyway and he doesn’t want to be the only one tracking every shadow along the horizon until it changes. His hollow, heartless chest aches the most when he thinks about the impending dawn and every time he wants to throw open the window or the door and shout, _Is anyone else awake? Is anyone else watching? Is anyone else waiting for the sunrise?)_

The sky is still dark, though, and the cat is still asleep. He looks down at the calico and notices the grooves on the table for the first time. This is an old hotel—it would make sense for there to be scratches on the furniture. He reaches out a hand and traces the scar in the wood, pulling away when he can’t feel it curve under his finger.

The cat is still asleep. _It’s going to miss the sunrise,_ he thinks. And then he feels stupid because he doesn’t know if cats care about sunrises.

The cat is still asleep and Brother is still asleep. He’s waiting on two things to wake up now. But he’s sitting next to an open window and the sky is more gray than black and he almost thinks the rain is whispering to him.

Al turns and watches the light flicker over the horizon.

**Author's Note:**

> AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH this was highkey a BEAST to edit. this thing is only 2k words but man did i have to use like maximum brainpower for every single sentence. this is my first attempt at like an introspective-y, plotless, pure EMOTION fic bc i have a lot of feelings about alphonse not being able to eat or sleep or feel for four years. this poor kid, someone hug him (i say, writing 2k words about his loneliness). anyway, i kind of like how this turned out, though there is also a LOT of room for improvement alkjdhfaklsjdf (practice makes better amirite folks)
> 
> please let me know what you think! and thank you for reading <3
> 
> if you want, come bother me on [tumblr](https://bringingglory.tumblr.com/)!


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